If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Mesa's GLSL Compiler Has Been Made To Stand Alone

09-10-2013, 08:00 PM

Phoronix: Mesa's GLSL Compiler Has Been Made To Stand Alone

Ian Romanick of Intel has restored work on having a standalone Mesa GLSL compiler separate from the rest of the Mesa implementation. The purpose of this standalone compiler is largely for testing purposes by OpenGL game/application developers in trying to verify/validate behavior and be independent of the specific Mesa drivers...

This is great. One of the biggest problems with GLSL in the proprietary AMD/Nvidia drivers (on all OSes) is that they each have their own implementations (including front-ends). While that doesn't really apply to the open-source graphics stack, advancement of this kind of modularized tech might eventually encourage those companies to share a open front-end implementation (removing the burden from GLSL devs from needing to be aware of the differences). Which is an area HLSL has GLSL beat.

Comment

This is great news. The old 3DLabs GLSLValidator library was getting way outdated, most people stopped using it a long time ago.

The NVdia GLSL compiler is much more lenient compared to ATI/AMD, which is more strict (although the former can be configured to be more strict with proper #version statement).

By removing unnecissary dependecies on the Mesa compiler it will make it easier to integrate this in development tools/pipelines. I would also expect to see future plugins for gedit and other text editors. I'm looking forward to using it.